The IDEA Design Scaffold: A Developmental Framework for Functional Ideation in Systemic Design

Abstract Functional ideation in systemic design unfolds within sociotechnical and sociocultural environments where goals, constraints, and evaluative criteria evolve across multiple levels of organization. Creativity research explains important aspects of novelty, variation, recombination, and selective retention, but it often treats novelty as emerging within a relatively stable representational space or a single level of abstraction. Systemic design scholarship, in turn, has developed strong approaches for framing complexity, mapping relations, organizing participation, and coordinating action, but it less often specifies how designers navigate between systemic levels, address challenges at different levels of abstraction, and construct intervention candidates while the task environment is still being differentiated. This paper responds by proposing a naturalistic framework of ideation within the Interactivist–Constructivist paradigm, with the IDEA Design Scaffold as its methodological architecture for systemic design. The central claim is that functional ideation under systemic complexity must be understood as a self-directed developmental process: intervention opportunities become novel and appropriate as designers navigate across levels of complexity through anticipatory exploration, partial stabilization, reflective reorganization, and rebuilding of missing supports. IDEAS operationalizes this account by linking Systemic Breakdown and Systemic Integration through the Iterative Innovation Cycle, enabling systemic goals, design challenges, and intervention candidates to be progressively coordinated without reducing ideation to a fixed procedure. The payoff is both theoretical and methodological: the paper explains why creative development in systemic design requires movement across levels of complexity, and provides an architecture for supporting, studying, and refining that movement in systemic design practice.